regardless of how much real-world money the fraud was supposedly worth, it was all fictional money people basically invested for fun. Anyone treating a game as a serious investment has problems that the FEC can't fix.

I see this as a positive thing for EVE, because it underlies how the game is a kind of organized crime simulator all-the-more.

The story is awesome but I hate gamergaia.com, they just re-post crap from forms and put it on their site.

You get isk by selling these tokens. You buy a token using your credit card and the token represents one month of playtime. Then you can sell this token to another player for ISK. (At-least that's how it was a few years ago. Id figure they have a more direct method by now.)

In the article "The amount of ISK stolen was enough to buy 2,953 30-day time codes which is worth a whopping $51,577.50" Th

You can't turn the 30 Day Pilot License Extension back into a Game Time Card. It's not possible to legitimately sell PLEX for real money, although there are third party sites that will sell PLEX for real money at slightly below market rates and deliver then in-game via Jita contract.

Black market RMT PLEX sells for almost half the price of PLEX acquired via GTC. The RMT seller must have a margin in there too, so in pure RMT terms if 1tn ISK is $51k in GTC PLEX it's worth more like $20k in RMT.

That's not that big a haul considering how long it took. Eddie really went to town spamming the trade hubs, I even remember seeing him in outlying systems round Amarr a few months back.

I'd seen him around Amarr as well. To be honest the only really shocking thing to hear about this guy was that he was actually that successful. I had taken him for a small peanuts type newb operation. He certainly didn't portray his corp as anything else. The fact that people are so easily exploited is baffling.

* It being against the rules, so the seller might be just ripping you off, since you have no recourse if you're cheated* Getting caught and either banned or having the PLEX confiscated by a GM* the buyer possibly being an undercover GM doing a sting.

It's black market for a reason. The guy selling it has no incentive except his reputation not to take your money and run. Since it's a TOS violation, you can't sue, and you can't complain to a GM.

people are still spending a LOT of time playing in order to earn this kind of money.

Not necessarily. If you have ISK to invest it doesn't take a lot of time to make more. I've made about 600 million ISK each of the last couple months by spending 15 minutes a day managing my investments. I guess you could argue for 7.5 hours invested per month this is not a very good pay rate but in the MMO scheme of things this is virtually no time at all.

I've come to a point where the game is actually boring because I have more cash than I need and nothing left to work for because skills take so long to train. I have the best gear I can buy for my skills, and my progression to bigger and better things is limited entirely by the flow of time rather than anything that gives me an incentive to play the game. I consider this an immense design flaw. Level 4 missions are boring. Mining is boring. Exploring is marginally interesting in the same way as a sudoku puzzle but ultimately futile because it just nets me more money. Switching to a PvP clone slows down skill training which is admittedly a tough decision in the face of mounting boredom. There is no reason for me to even log in besides managing investments and talking to corpmates. Needless to say I'm looking forward to Diablo3.

Cue some tool replying to this saying "If you can buy everything you need with under X bajillion ISK then you must not have faction module ABC which offers 0.0001% better stats than your meta-level 4 ABC module."

The reason you are bored is because you aren't playing EVE yet. You are just playing in the baby area, with the toys we left there to keep the kids from pissing us off. I'm entirely serious. If you have been playing EVE for more than 6 months, and you haven't gotten involved in some form or another of PVP, then you are denying yourself the entire POINT of EVE. Not to whip out the old stereotypes, but carebearing has never really been the

I've come to a point where the game is actually boring because I have more cash than I need and nothing left to work for because skills take so long to train. I have the best gear I can buy for my skills, and my progression to bigger and better things is limited entirely by the flow of time rather than anything that gives me an incentive to play the game. I consider this an immense design flaw. Level 4 missions are boring. Mining is boring. Exploring is marginally interesting in the same way as a sudoku puzzle but ultimately futile because it just nets me more money. Switching to a PvP clone slows down skill training which is admittedly a tough decision in the face of mounting boredom. There is no reason for me to even log in besides managing investments and talking to corpmates. Needless to say I'm looking forward to Diablo3.

Buy a PvP character and use it as money sink. No need to endlessly train a new character, especially if you bathe in ISK.

Actually, some people do treat Eve as a serious investment, like the real money traders ISK Bank. Using them violates the TOS; it's not something I would do even though their prices are far cheaper than selling PLEX purchased legitimately.

Having said that, ISK Bank apparently make enough money to keep the Russian that runs it in vodka and caviar.

For most people Eve is just a game though. There's no legitimate way to extract money from it, in fact the smart way to play Eve is to figure out how to generate en

Yes it's fictional money, but people spend real money (each month) to play the game.
Once people are spending real money, they expect certain safeguards. How much you can safeguard against human behaviour I don't know.
However I do remember a story about the company that runs EVE Online employing an economist to deal with the ingame currency ISK.
Most of what is described though is part of the game and learning not to get scammed etc.

No, one of the worst things about a Ponzi scheme is being someone not screwed over by it, yet not knowing it's a scam. Are you supposed to give the money back? What happens if someone finds out you didn't lose everything? They'll be very angry with you, because usually that first line of early-adopters are the people attacked, not the folks who started it.

No, one of the worst things about a Ponzi scheme is being someone not screwed over by it, yet not knowing it's a scam.

A scam that stands up to even a small amount of serious scrutiny is an exceedingly rare entity. If you didn't know, you definitely could have obtained a good idea. While proving that something like this is a scam is usually difficult, knowing it is not. It's just a matter of basic due diligence.

But maybe you're the trusting sort who wants to believe that every random stranger who come

Because if you understood it fully then you are a scammer, not a victim. The only way to make money from a Ponzi scheme is to get in early, those who get in early are running the scam not victims.

Someone who invests in a thing without knowing all about it, without fully evaluating exactly what risk they are taking, is not a victim. They are consciously making a poor, risky decision. When they do this and lose their shirts you call them "victims". That's some kind of emotional sensation that sounds somewhat reasonable but does not stand up to examination.

From the scammers themselves, as quoted in TFA:

We set up our financial planning to be able to grow as fast as possible, but with increments that would enable us to efficiently reach our goals; not too fast, not too slow. Both going too slow or too fast would have stopped us too soon. We adapted our advertising to the financial planning. We only advertised in local chatboxes in solar systems. We had several reasons for this method. (One was to stay in control of the amount of attention our services received.

We slowly increased the amount of ads dropped per day. We intentionally didn't go big on the forums. The forums, market discussions specifically, have always been the place to "bash" any new services. A big drawback to forums is - information stays on forums forever. Every potential investor would read all the negativism. With ads in local, we got some negative responses too, but they disappeared after a very short while. That's how a chatbox works.

Generally, honest investment plans are done in the open. They do not fear a permanent record.

Someone who invests in a thing without knowing all about it, without fully evaluating exactly what risk they are taking, is not a victim. They are consciously making a poor, risky decision. When they do this and lose their shirts you call them "victims". That's some kind of emotional sensation that sounds somewhat reasonable but does not stand up to examination.

They are victims if they no know better. Is it fair to steal candy from a baby? To rob the elderly because they are too weak to protect themselves?

They are victims if they no know better. Is it fair to steal candy from a baby? To rob the elderly because they are too weak to protect themselves?

There's lots of things I don't know how to do. I either learn how to do them (that's education) or I don't attempt them at all if learning how isn't worth the effort to me. Either way, I understand when I do and don't know what I am dealing with. This is the kind of common sense you can't really teach someone, except by example. It's not "education" in the s

The thing is, *if* you know it's a Ponzi scheme, and *if* you know when it's going to collapse so you can pull out at the right time, it can net you quite a lot of money. Not realising either of these two things of course can be a way to loose a lot of money too.

What I don't get is why anyone would bother with such "investments" in the first place. The ROI promised by investing in Eddie's company was really peanuts. It was rather like sitting on your hands while you watched interest accrue (and your money de-value) on a RL certificate of deposit. A couple basic trade runs would have netted better.

"stories of theft, underhanded dealings, criminal empires and general unscrupulous play." That's Bitcoin. The Bitcoin world has a story like that about once a week. The entire Bitcoin economy does about the volume of one supermarket.

Did you see the number of exclamation points up there? Not to mention how much Slashdot covers Bitcoin? It's WAY louder than a supermarket. Maybe not as loud as an outdoor auction place like Tsukiji in Tokyo.

I'm not a luddite by any means but I still don't understand people's will spend money on virtual property. I understand buying a game outright to play it. I understand renting one. I don't understand the willingness to pay real money for fictional in game articles. I think it's a form of insanity. In fact after contributing in game content for free in my younger days and watching games fade out of existence - even games with a rock solid user base like Microsoft Flight Simulator - I'm less willing to spend

Unless you are a GM, you can't make another anything by just hitting a key on your keyboard. Due to abuse, even those powers are carefully monitored.

The marginal cost of any single item in the EVE universe... is roughly 1 super computer cluster, and 10 years of pay for a development team. Because that's what it took to get here. If you have the ability to bang out a new EVE cluster, populate it, breath life into that population, and then just pop new ships and items into being... well you go right on

Just FYI, the dollar figure quoted is how much it'd cost to buy that much ISK if you were converting Eve Game Time Cards at today's prices.

It's entirely possible, with a little skill and effort, to play Eve essentially for free. Spending money upfront to turn a GTC into ISK is actually pretty sensible. I did it to generate some operating capital and now I'm the situation of having a trade / industry alt that I log into every few days to update orders, move stock around and whatnot (pretty much the trading p

And more importantly, because *other people* will judge you based on your tastes. Even though you might (and with good reason) not personally value a high cost brand over a cheap one, you have to accept the fact that other people will be watching your price tags, and it will control whose shoulders and elbows you'll get to rub with.

I and many EVE players will agree 100% with what you said. However, the reason there is an in-game to real life money conversion in EVE is because you can buy game time with real money, convert that game time into an in-game item which can then be sold for in-game money to another player, who can then convert that item back to game time on his account (or a few other services such as character transfers/portrait changes, etc). But the overall idea is simply that some people will have real money but not time

You don't spend real-world money on in-game items. The only thing you have to pay for is the monthly subscription.

This is talking about someone who accrued a shitload of in-game currency, completely in-game. There was no real-world currency involved, except the article's comparison to $50,000 in subscription fees(because you can trade in-game currency for game time).

Technically, buying a video game is "spending money on virtual property." It's just that normally you get a whole lot of it for 20-60 bucks, but companies like Blizzard have realized that once they make that initial sale, they can sell you vastly less content for hyperinflated prices. Valve is also doing this with Team Fortress 2, where you can purchase hats and guns for real world money. Luckily you can also just make them or trade for them if you really want them.

Why is that dumb? Most subscription-based MMOs charge $15 / €12 or so a month. That is less than one visit to the cinema. For that price you get a hell of a lot of entertainment out of an MMO, if you're into that sort of thing. Even if you sometimes buy a few gewgaws for real money from other players or an in-game store, it's still one of the cheaper pastimes in €/hour.

By the way, some MMOs are great vehicles for player-run RP scenarios, and you'll find plenty of roleplaying going on in the

Along the way, 345.18 billion ISK was paid out to investors as interest to make sure the scheme kept going. Another 452.72 billion was withdrawn by worried investors before the company shut down; that left 1,034 billion ISK in the hands of the company's owners.

I always wonder how many of these worried investors recognized the scheme for what it was right away, and decided to try and make some profit out of it themselves.

I read the same stories over and over again about EVE it really shouldn't be considered news anymore. It's Monday: babies were born, people died, people got scammed in EVE - business as usual.

The people who are serious about that game are there precisely to play with exactly those sorts of behavior. I feel a little sorry for new players who don't know that yet, but even the most basic research about the game would clue you in. What other games would call griefing and fraud are the real game of EVE - all that crap about spaceships is just to keep the marks distracted while the sharks nibble away at them.

You are right. It's why I quit EVE after some (I'd say too much) time.

Actually I never got scammed (despite a few close calls), but I kind of hated the virtual world.

You couldn't join a corporation without "background checks" and people were, simply put, paranoid to the bone. All I ever wanted is to shoot some NPCs and explore. My goals in EVE were fairly simple: Kill NPCs, get nice loot, use that loot to kill NPCs, ad nauseam. With friends.

$50K is like... what real scammers make in a day, or in an hour. The actual tragedy is that ingame currency actually has an OOG value because like most MMO's, EVE has succumbed to the temptation of RMT.

There is no real conversion between EVE I$K and real money other than the one players put on it, just like any other MMO game. It is against the TOS to actually buy or sell I$K for real money, though they give you a way to legitimately do it by buying game time cards and 'selling' those for in-game currency.

A 30-day time code will net you between 200Million I$K and 600Million I$K depending on where and when you sell it in the game. Like everything in EVE, there are wide market fluctuations for even the game

Ahh, you're right, I thought the EIB was into the trillions, but they only pulled off about 800 billion. However, looking at old news storys they seem to value the 800 billion around 170,000 USD mark, has the ISK to USD market got way down in the last few years, or was that just a sensationalist claim?

PVP: a slugflest the outcome of which is basically predetermined from the beginning of the engagement.

No Captain Kirk ramming the crippled ship down the giant evil reefer's maw, no Adama jumping the battlestar into the atmosphere underneath the Cylon over watch, no hiding behind an asteroid, no jamming their comms, no collision damage... no skill or cunning at all. Once someone with a better fit scrams you, you can take your hands of the keyboard and the outcome will be the same.